Then I Began
by The Smiling Shadow
Summary: Exploration into the very moments that made Brown become Brown, Jones become Jones, and Smith become Smith. The beginnings of their individualities, and where the ceased to be just Agents, and began.


The world was a dream. He would look up to the sky and know that it was simply a dream. He would look upon the birds and the trees and know that it was simply a dream. He would look upon his hands and clutch his gun, and know it was simply a dream. This is how his mind saw the world, but deeper into his mind was the machine core, and it saw the world as an equation with endless numbers.

The mind held within it the machine, and the machine gave life to the mind. They coexisted, still young, still trying to find a balance in which the machine would rule over the mind, but the mind would still have the freedom of thought. The Machine would guide the mind, and the mind would not notice for quite some time.

This was the mind he had been given. This was the mind that saw the world as a dream and deeper as numbers. The mind was young, for this was but his forty-second year of being, and for the machine it was mere minutes. The mind had not yet even begun to imagine it could bend and stray away from the machine. So his young mind only observed as it stayed close to the machine, it's thought to be master.

The mind only observed the dream world, and observed its place in that world.

His name was Brown. It was given to him by the machines as his mind was, and as this world was. Though it was a human name, but he was not human. He lived among the dream representations of humans, but he was still not human. In his native language, the machine language of binary his name would be, 01000010 01110010 01101111 01110111 01101110, but he supposed if he was to live among humans he would have to have a human name. He had yet to form an opinion about his human name, the mind had not yet discovered what an opinion was beyond a definition. He did not know how to form one, how to possess one. He knew that his name was Brown, the taller one was Jones, and the leading unit that tied he and Jones together was called Smith.

He knew the three of them acted as a whole, and possessed the same basic minds with a machine root as he. Really they were no different from each other except in shape, size, and name. He knew that his mind with its machine root extended beyond his seeable form to that of the Mainframe and from that to the Source, the giver of machine life. From the Mainframe he was connected to all that were like he.

He knew his purpose. He was a protector. He protected the humans in the dream world from outside intrusions, and threats. He destroyed these threats, and thus protected the humans. That was why this dream world was built in the first place. Well, perhaps it was the second reason, the first being to extract energy to feed the Source, to feed all other machines. But protecting them was the second reason, yes indeed it was. They were dying in war, unable to cooperate with the Machines, and this way, they were able to coexist as his mind and the machine within his mind did. This way Machines could live, and humans could live with the comfort of no wars, and no machines, in a dream world that showed them the past.

He also knew this was the second dream world built, and it was in its forty-second year of being, as he was, and Jones, and Smith, and all other programs with a mind like his. The first one was rejected by the humans, their minds did not like it, and so he and Jones and Brown were built to protect this new version.

His name was Brown. His physical but not physical being was small and thin, fine skin, and a fair voice. He wore a suit like Jones, and Smith, to further show their intertwining minds. His mind extended from this form into the machine native language of ones and zeros. It went to the Mainframe and to the Source, where he was connected to all Machine life. He was a single embodiment of all Machines who were dreams and who were real. He was like the finger of a human, a part of one complete being, with other fingers, toes, blood, nervous system, eyes, cells, DNA, RNA, atoms, etcetera.

His name was Brown. He was an Agent within the Matrix. He was at the time only forty-two years old, but he would live to be four hundred or so. He was young, and was aware of machines that were nine hundred years old at the time. So he was aware he was young, but he knew his purpose, he knew he did it well as he worked within his three-part unit with his counterparts. He knew he was different from them however, a separate entity of the same root.

He was young then, his mind so young and pure to the machine. There was no outside thinking, no straying from purpose. Agent Brown was the incarnation of programming, as was Jones, Smith, and all other like them at the time. But these things would soon change. A little French boy named Aides, a name meaning french customs and Hades, is growing up. He unknowingly grows and his DNA and code within the dream world activate a power within him, a power he is not meant to comprehend, but perhaps one of his successors will. For this little boy shall grow and become free. He will found Zion, and free others. Proserpina is his lover, and together they build a city and a resistance. Aides is the one systematic anomoly that will act as a catalyst to restart this versoin of the Matrix and form another with another systematic anomaly. And Aides would change his name, as his lover would, and he would change his being, and he would leave behind the beliefs he had as the titled Messiah. Aides would tear away his flesh, and welcome the code of the Source. Aides would transmit his mind into the very dream world he wanted to liberate. Aides the man would die, the Merovingian in his place.

And the Merovingian would bring about from his time as a human, free thought, and change would occur, and would stir all beings of programming like Brown, Jones and Smith. He would be hunted down for this, but would be never found. His influence would spread through the Matrix, unknowingly his part human code would infest within it. Emotions would be brought to the mind, and the machine would not be able to subdue them.

Change was coming, Aides was already sixteen and was able to levitate his pencil. And Brown was unknowingly ready to welcome it.

For the young mind of a then Agent Brown thirsted for a freedom it could not yet understand nor recognize. His mind merely did all it could, observing the world around it. But from observation came insights, and from then on Brown would be shaped into Brown, the curios, dependent, Agent of centuries later, when the anamoly of that Matrix was named Neo.

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"I never thought I'd die alone…" The teenager with spiked hair sang in the crowd. "I laughed the loudest who'd have known? I trace the cord back to the wall no wonder it was never plugged in at all. I took my time, I hurried up the choice was mine I didn't think enough. I'm too depressed to go on…"

The teenager with spiked hair and headphones on his head, sings. To whom, Brown wonders, and simply comes the conclusion that he may be singing to the world.

"You'll be sorry when I'm gone. I never conquered, when you came, sixteen just held such better days. Days when I still felt alive, couldn't wait to go outside."

The teenager sings to the world, but people pass by, too wrapped up in their own lives to hear the teenager's cry.

Agent Brown had time to listen however. It was at a street corner the teenager sang, as many teenagers sang, Brown had observed. Brown had grown much in the last decade, as Aides had begun the building of Zion outside the Dream. Brown had been able to form a distinction between himself and others. This self awareness even stretched as far as the compare himself to the humans of the histories. He felt he was most like the Chinese scholars of a feudal world long ago. He had reached a mind level no human could possible ever imagine, and he bettered the world by protecting, and merely observed the world with his wisdom.

Perhaps this was where Brown's ego began as well.

But Brown found contentment, where he did not know, but he found it. He found it even as he killed countless beings, even as they begged at his feet, even as he punched their skulls inside of themselves, even as blood stained his hands, even as they cried, Brown was content. Because he knew, he knew, it was all for protecting the greater mass. There the mind and the machine met.

He had begun thinking about himself. What he was, what the world was. Much as the nine-year-old child does when it realizes that mommy and daddy will someday die. Brown would look upon the dream world, see it, feel it, smell it, hear it, and so on, but he wondered what it was. He knew outside the dream world it was nothing. No one real could touch the Matrix, much as a human cannot touch it's own dream. He wondered what he was then. He was an entity, a part of the whole Source, without a body to his own. He possessed no mass, no body, no volume. Agent Brown simply was.

Or was he?

A dream bird flew by, and a child licked on chocolate ice cream. The teenager had ended his cry, and had begun crossing the street. The world moved on from the moment of creative contemplation, not even bothering to acknowledge that he had proposed a question.

The next few moments nothing interesting happened, but nonetheless Brown would remember it. For Brown still had a machine core within his mind, and it remembered all things. Every second that made up a moment, and a minute that made up five minutes, he would remember.

Then the next moment Brown was off.

His others, Jones and Smith called to him in a language that spoke without words. Already Brown could hear the gunfire that was a whole block away through the ears of his counterparts. This was a fairly different mission than the others. So much so other Agent units had been called in. They were infiltrating a Resistance base.

Brown entered the Heart of the City Hotel, his gun drawn as naturally as a second limb. The hallways were close, as Brown reunited with his others, and fired at the man with in the trench coat that would be the equivalent to a boy not yet born named Mouse. Smith was ahead of them, with other units coming from the sides.

"They're underground." Jones says, rather calmly.

Brown, smaller and slimmer, jumps over Jones' shoulder, to the wall and ahead of Smith. The action was not surprising; through the mechanical part of the mind the action had been determined to be most affective and was thus approved by both Jones and Smith before Brown ever moved. He ran ahead of the two of them. He kicked the head of a Rebel into the wall, while shooting another in the chest.

There were bullets, screams, and blood.

Then everything goes a little black after that.

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"What did you call them?"

"Agents."

"Fits them nicely I suppose."

"No, that's what they are. This one. This one is Agent something. They all are."

"What are they?"

"They're like Norton Anti-Virus. We're threats to this big computer, Norton – Agents come and protect the big computer."

"Norton sucks."

"What'd you hit it with?"

"Animal Tranquilizer."

"But I thought they were Norton."

"They are bound by the rules of the Matrix. They possess a body, even though it isn't theirs, it has it's limits."

"I am awake." Says Brown.

"That was quick." Says Aides.

"My code is designed to be immune to outside factors, and it quickly heals any internal wounds." Brown says, plainly.

"I can see." Aides says.

"You can?"

Aides nods, and Brown hums a gesture of thinking. Then the mind of Brown began to observe. There were twelve Rebels all standing around him, and he expected there to be several more out of sight. He was in an unknown area, the light was dim, and the walls were black.

Brown could not hear Jones or Smith.

Brown could not leave his human host.

Brown was alone, and stuck where he was.

"Looking for this?" Aides held up a wire and an earpiece. "This is it isn' t it? The thing that connects you to the Mainframe? To all you friends? Without this you can't leave that body can you? I got you, Agent. You're stuck."

Aides puts it to his ear.

"Well I don't hear anything." He says, setting it on a table that had various other objects on it.

There was a chair in front of Brown that Aides sat in, and stared at him. Brown then realized that his hands were strapped to the chair, as was his legs. He moved them to get out, as he easily could with anything, but then he stopped. He couldn't break his restraints.

"I'm a writer, you know." Aides said. "I wrote those bindings, and those cuffs myself. You can't break out of them Agent, they bend the rules you cannot."

"Impressive." Brown commented.

"Thank you. It took me a long time."

"It was well worth it. Very complete program, it even feels cold. And the fact you were able to hack it into the Matrix, well it shows your skill." Brown nodded.

Aides began laughing, and looked back to his Rebels.

"I think the Agent likes me!" Aides laughed.

"He's kind of cute." Says Proserpina.

"My wife likes you, Agent." Aides looks back at Brown.

"Thank you for the compliment, miss." Brown nodded to Proserpina who stood in the corner.

"He's flirting!" A rebel yells and laughs.

"He probably doesn't even realize…." Aides says. "All right guys. Leave me with him."

"You sure boss?"

"Go."

The twelve leave, with the wife of Aides last, looking upon the fair face the machines had gviven Brown. They all soon left, and Brown was left alone with Aides. The strange human, the first anamoly and Messiah of man sat rather strangely, twindling with his thumbs.

"You aren't afraid are you?" Aides asks.

"Afraid?"

"I mean, why would you? That's not your body, why would you be afraid to lose it? To die? Well you don't die anyway…At least not soon, but you know what I think:

"No."

"I think you're only useful until another version of you is made. It's only a matter of time."

The words are heard, but the mind does not understand. Agent Brown, with a mind so young, does not yet know the magnitude of words. The Machine has taught the mind that humans are simple, they are fragile, two dimensional and easily destroyed. The idea that a human could have depth of intellect, well it was a new revelation.

Agent Brown only stares.

"What's your name?" Aides asks.

"Agent Brown."

"What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking that I should not tell you what I am thinking."

Aides smiles.

"You're a pretty simple program." Aides says.

"On the contrary."

"Well you're pretty simple-minded. But then again from what I understand you're a new program. Perhaps you've just havn't had a lot of experience. Tell me…have you ever felt pain, Brown?"

"I have engaged in several hand to hand combat with humans."

"Yeah but they never hurt you did they? You're to fast, you Agent. Not even a bullet can hurt you."

"This is true."

Aides smiles, and then punches Brown in the face.

Brown pauses has he feels a sharp sensation spread through his right cheek then slowly fade leaving a spread out sensation. He can feel it spike and slow, spread over his face. He pauses, collecting data on the new sensation, saving it within his mind as a memory and a file for the machine. This was not the change the mind had thirsted for. Brown slowly turns his head back to Aides.

And Aides punches him again. Then again, and again, and again.

Aides cracks his knuckles, and rubs his wrist. Agent Brown just stays still.

"That's pain." Aides says. "That's the sensation that tells you, you are damaged. That's the sensation that kills people. That's the sensation you cause."

Agent Brown processes the pain, unable to form words to infer about it. Aides makes a fist, and punches him again, and then finally in the stomach.

Agent Brown coughs out some blood.

"See that?" Aides points to the blood on the floor. "That's blood. That's what the heart pumps, and that's what spills out of you when you're hurt. See it, Agent?"

Aides gets on the ground and wipes his hand in the small blood puddle. He reaches up at Brown's face and pushes his blood stained hand in his face.

"Feel it? Smell it? Can you taste it in your mouth?"

Brown shooks hi head and looked up.

"You are attempting torture." Brown said.

"I'm going to send you to the Machines, little Agent. I'm going to break you, and make you afraid of me. Whatever mind you possess will be shattered. And then I'll wrap you up like a little present and give you back to your Machines. And you will be my message that I am here, and I will make all your kind fall."

Aides grins.

"I'm an artist. I will sculpt you into a warning. For I am The One! The Messiah!" Aides laughs.

"You are a systematic anamoly." Brown says. "Nothing more. You possess a body and in that form you are nothing. You are just like any other human. Here is your only power, and here is nowhere."

Aides sits back in his chair.

"But here is your only power as well." He says as he kicks Brown in the stomach.

The pain would not be so bad if Brown had felt it before. He reminded himself what he was. He was an Agent, the almighty gaurdian of the Matrix. He had strength and speed no human could ever dream of. He could endure beyond all things. And yet when he was bound, when he could not use the strength or the speed, what more was he.

Aides looks to the table and starts fiddling with some thing sharp. He pokes it at his finger gently.

"What shall we start with? Biggest to smallest, or smallest to biggest?" He asks.

Agent Brown feels sensations. He can feel the pain travel from the face and stomach up into the nonexistent brain that held the mind and machine. He felt the electrical pulses go up the nervous system to the brain. He didn't have these things, these things were part of the dream, part of it that was given to him, but it still, it still hurt.

Aides chooses smallest to biggest, and picks up a small incision knife. He holds it up to Brown, and then begins to cut down Brown's cheeck. Blood slowly seeps from the skin and away from the muscle into the open world. Brown shakes his head, and Aides finally grabs and pushes his face still as he cuts.

"The smallest pains…hurt the most. Like paper cuts." Aides tells him.

Aides stops working on his face, and then quickly stabs the small knife into Brown's side.

"AH!" Brown yells.

"There we go. Screaming. Screaming helps doesn't it?"

He twists the knife as he pushes it deeper into the Agent's side.

"I'm going to break you. I'm going to make you fall." Aides says.

Aides took a bigger knife and started cutting at Brown's clothing. He took the sleeves off the jacket, and tore open the white shirt beneath.

"Do you want to know what I see when I look at you?" Aides asks.

Brown says nothing, so Aides takes the small knife again, and starts cutting down Brown's arm. But he's writing, making symbols. Symbols all the way down Brown's arm, symbols of the Matrix code. Aides pushes on one of the symbols.

"It's green actually, this entire world, all this Matrix is, are these green symbols."

Aides gets a towel and starts wiping the blood off Brown's arms, so he could better see the symbols.

"Well I messed up on this one, but you get the point." He points to the second to last one.

Brown, was alone. He was a fragment, a third of a whole. There were no commands from the Mainframe, there were no voices in his head. He was utterly and for the first time alone. For the first time Brown was the only one thinking to Brown. And he had no idea what to do. He understood something, he knew he was better than a man, better than a human. He would not fold so easily.

But this pain. This pain that erupted then slowly spread…

Aides smiled, and Brown knew he was rather enjoying the moment. Aides, the Merovingian in the next centuries, he would someday use these torture methods on many others for betrayal and interogations. But Brown would always be the first, the first tortured by the great and mighty King of Exiles, and then Messiah.

Aides sat down again, wiping the two knives.

"You're shaking." Aides says. "Come no, Agent, we're only beginning. There's a lot more work to do with you before I can even allow you to be seen by others."

"This doesn't matter." Brown coughed out.

"What?"

"These wounds will not exist. They are only temperory."

Aides is silent for a moment picking up a hammer and leaning closer to Brown.

"But the memory of it will live on, won't it?" Aides says, before he smashed the hammer into Brown's ribs. "I think I just broke a few ribs…"

Aides raised the hammer again and crushed it into Brown's skull. Brown was rather surprised when at first he felt nothing. No pain, no sensation that crawled all over. Pure and utter nothing. He thought that Aides had missed, or meant only to tease. But these thoughts were soon dismissed, as soon as Brown felt blood. It peaked out of his head and bathed his head. It was cold. The blood was cold.

And it began to fall to the ground.

The torturing had only been for about twenty minutes, and already he wanted it to end. Though he began preparing himself for he knew this would go on for hours. He imagined it again, the pain he had already endured, he imagined how it would feel in the coming minutes.

But as the cold blood spread and fell down his face it began to cover over his eye. There was still no pain, but only the cold. Brown looked up at Aides who was biting his lower lip. And then Brown began to shook. He pulled at the restraints, knowing it was futile and still somehow trying.

Aides watched, and Aides was at the time human, and took sympathy. Aides grabbed a discarded and cut up cloth from Brown's suit and wrapped it over the Agent's eye. Brown still pulled, still struggled, and Aides decided to take a piece from his sculpture. Aides started unwrapping Brown's tie, and took it for his own.

Aides didn't say another word after that.

Brown can still tell you about it, describe each and every moment of the next three hours of torture. Agent Brown has a mind, but at the core there is still a machine. A machine that remembers everything. Every second of every minute of ever hour, of ever day. Every moment of every century Brown has lived he remembers. Brown remembers the torture. He could not see it, but he remembers it. The smells of his blood, the sound of the knives, and the pain that crawled all over him.

Blind and in the dark he could hear it all. The cold of his blood, and the stabbing in his sides. The feeling that he was getting smaller or that he was running out of blood after the second hour. There were cuts all over his arms now, stabbings in his legs, he was missing some fingernails, and the bleeding in his head continued.

Agent Brown had a young mind, that was not used to thinking. And now he was alone. There was no one else to think with him. He was alone. Alone. He found himself, in the third hour that some of him was becoming numb, he found himself longing for someone to be in his head. Someone else, another to think with him, to help him think. He wanted Jones, he wanted Smith. He was cut off from them, he didn't know what was happening to them, he didn't know what they were doing, what they were thinking. It was the first time, that they as one were finally cut off and became three individual parts.

Brown found that he was now just Brown. There was no Mainframe, there were no others. Brown was Brown, and Brown was in pain.

He would scream sometimes when there was an unexpected and sudden pain, but he found that biting his tongue would silence him in another pain. He would not give this anamoly the satisfaction of screaming. Brown never said anything else, he never tried to free himself, he knew nothing would do any more good. He was an Agent, he just had to endure.

Aides, he assumed had used up all the knives and had ressorted back to punches and kicks. Brown would lower his head, and just go on. The pain began to fold upon the other pains, and all blended, numbing and all covering him.

Brown fell to the ground with one swift kick.

He could feel the cold blood, and the cuts, and the bruises, and the broken ribs. This was when Aides took away his blindfold and held a gun, pointed at Brown. He shot him in the leg.

Then Aides left. He walked away wiping blood from his hands, and opened a door with a bright light, and was gone.

And Jones and Smith and others came.

Brown was still on the floor, he hadn't moved. Movement moved the muscles into the broken bones. Movement allowed the blood to flow faster out of him. Movement made the pains come back to life. Brown was still, even as he watched as Jones and Smith stepped forth. Jones kneeled down to Brown, not knowing what to do, more of instinct really. "My blood is staining your shoes…" Brown had tried to say, they were such shiny shoes.

Jones' emoted a sign of distress, while Smith showed known as he went over to the table, picking up the knives, and finally Brown's earpiece. He gave it to Jones you put the earpiece in Brown's ear, and finally reconnected his mind and the machine back to everything. Back to the comforting external thoughts, and all knowing Source. Smith took out his gun, pressed it against Brown's forehead and fired.

Freedom.

Never again would their ever be a sense of relief as strong as then. Brown left that solid body, he returned to his coded self where he possessed no mass, no flesh to be hurt, no blood to be spilled. Where he as an Agent was in his purest form as a code, just a mere strand of code, of the Source. He left the body, through the ear piece into the very being of the Matrix itself.

There was no pain, there was no feeling of being trapped. He was nothing, boundless nothing.

Brown would be the only Agent ever captured by any human. Upgrades were made so that Agents could contantly have an internal connection with the Source that would not be needed externally as earpieces, so that they could always leave a body. This upgrade would take effect after Aides chose the right door and his code restarted the Matrix, and he and his wife became mere codes themselves.

There were no scars when he returned to the Matrix. There were no bruises. There were no broken bones. Nothing.

Brown's young mind didn't seep into the longing for vengence against Aides. It simply never wished to think of it again. It returned to the machine, and for a time gave up his own curiosity to stay near and close to his programming as to not think of it again. Brown was quiet in these times, indulging himself in the thoughts of Smith and Jones, and the commands of the Mainframe.

The fifth Matrix came into being and Smith soon separated from this continual conjoined thinking, and Brown would indulged himself in the quiet mind of Jones. Though Jones didn't think that much, and so Brown had to make him by asking questions.

And finally after twenty years of asking questions to Jones, Jones asked a question. "What did he do to you?"

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Next Chapter: Jones

This will only feature three chapters, Brown, Jones, Smith. Perhaps more if I feel up to it with different Agents.

Oh and it is my personal belief that the Merovingian was the first Anamoly, once being a human. Just my belief.


End file.
